I know making RPGs are really hard but man you could've picked a better genre then co-op roguelike button masher. It probably didn't help that I played the whole game by myself but really I don't think I'd want to subject my friends with 5 drawn out level filled with spongy enemies, shallow rouge like systems, and almost no variety for missions or objectives; this game really is just 5 hours of samey looking areas with the same button mashing combat with shallow systems and nothing else.

I guess you could get some laughs from the game but personally I think South Park has gone downhill in the writing department for the past few years and this game just kinda proves me even more right that Tray and Matt are so washed.

If you really want to play a co-op multiplayer game with friends that’s less then 40 dollars just play Helldivers 2, honestly just fuck this game.

I don't ever wanna hear anyone ever say "Oh Redfall was pretty bad but not as bad as Gollum or that King Kong game", mf this game is worse then both of them and I've played all 3 so I know what I'm talking about.

Now is Gollum and Kong "objectively" worse than Redfall, yes; but I don't like viewing art in objective terms. So let me say it like this. Gollum and Kong were both made by smaller middle budget studios given a minuscule budget and an even smaller time frame to release said game. In the case of Kong it's just boring shovelware that somehow got popular on Twitter and Youtube, and in the case of Gollum it was the victim of a studio way too passionate and not nearly as talented giving an impossible task and as a result an interesting if not flawed idea turned into one of the biggest jokes of last year causing everyone at the studio to lose their jobs.

Redfall is neither of those. Redfall is scum. Redfall is the result of higher power taking a quick glance at popular trends and then tasking an extremely talented team to make something they're not trained or know how to make. So the game pretty much languishes in development hell for years causing the studio to bleed all that amazing talent from their past games, and then the higher powers decide they got cold feet and no longer want the game they asked the studio who knew nothing about this genre of game and know want them to make it like all their other games, unfortunately that's not how game development works and they were too far in to backtrack now and too much money had been sunk into it so now it has to be a patch work job where the devs need to work around the game they spent 3 years making in order to please the higher powers. Then the higher powers get bought out by an evil power hungry mega corporation and now Redfall is not just "a new game made by Arkane '' but rather "a new game/reason to buy an Xbox". It's now been put on a pedestal by Xbox and Bethesda executives as the next big AAA Xbox release and now the patchwork game that barely works and should've been canned years ago needs to match up to the high echelons of not just the studios past games but also a brand that is comprised of franchises like Halo, Gears of War, and Blinx The Time Sweeper.
So the game released and it's a complete disaster, not because it's a buggy barely functioning game, but also because it's a big fat load of shit.

As looter shooter go Redfall does pretty much nothing new with it's systems and mechanics that have been in-play since 2012, and as a FPS it's somehow worse than Prey 2017 which is funny since the guns in that game were better than Redfall's and that was one of Prey's biggest faults. Enemy variety is piss poor even after all the updates the AI is still dumb as shit. Missions and objectives try to do the usual Arkane immersive sim pick your own path style but since it's an open map and not handcrafted levels the mission designers can't go crazy with path ideas so as a result it's very bland and basic. Character are the most annoying "how do you do fellow kids" shit I've seen since the Saints Row Remake and it really didn't do the game any favorites that the character I picked was probably the most annoying one out of the lot. (Her tagline was The Telekinetic Threat in Student Debt :T) It probably also dosn't help that the story of the game is told not through cutscenes but rather through still framed of model with narration in the background, I've seen Xbox Live Arcade games with more unique cutscenes and animations then this what the fuck??????

Redfall is a products and I mean that in the most demeaning way imaginable. Almost every aspect this game has does nothing new and feels like a hollow attempt to ride the trends of other games while not understanding what made them good. I shit you not I genuinely think the Gollum vs Sméagol argument system is a more original and fun idea then anything in Redfall, yeah sure it didn't work properly and was kinda goofy but the idea for it showed the devs knew what they were working on and wanted to try something that was inline with Gollum as a character and it's a more original idea then anything in Redfall. By the end of Redfall during the final boss I had lost most if not all respect for the game, and then the game hit me with a basic enemy gauntlet and a final (press E to kill the final boss). After doing that and seeing the last cutscene deadass I was like this for the rest of the night My honest reaction.

I hate this game, it's everything I hate about the AAA gaming scene and it's borderline anti-art.

Fuck Redfall.

I have a weird love hate relationship with games that pride themselves on being "subversive".

On the one hand I have no problem with media that wants to break social norms and taboos so long as what their making as an overall point to it and isn't just "lol isn't this fucked up, crazy right.". If done right you can get masterpieces of subversive media like A Clockwork Orange, Funny Games, Pink Flamingos and Freddy Got Fingered, unfortunately I can count on one hand the amount of video games I've personally seen that've tried and failed at tackling subversive media. When most games set out to tackle this level of writing and story tell it can either go two ways, It's either by a group of creative individuals who have a strong view of what their game is trying say along with having strong narrative themes that intertwine with the gameplay and narrative, games like Undertale, Cruelty Squad, Death Stranding, Hotline Miami 2, Spec Ops The Line, and Conker's Bad Fur Day. On the other side of the coin you have games that say they have a strong message and a subversive narrative but either fail from sheer incompetence of storytelling and thematic elements and tone deafness; even if they did try to incorporate the gameplay by tying it in with the game’s overall point it can still fail by not having a strong enough concrete vision of their game causing the rest of the game to fall apart in the process, game like Hatred, Twelve Minutes, Postal, Bioshock Infinite, Last of Us 2, Mafia 3, and Saints Row 3.
The real question here is what camp does Harvester fall into.

Harvester is a tough sell for me because while I really love the late 90’s early CG visuals and the use of crunchy FMV for their character sprites and cutscenes; and the acting is………camp, very……very camp. Unfortunately for all the elements of the game I really liked it’s weighed down by the biggest problem with the game being that it’s not a very good game to play plus I don’t respect what the game is trying to say.
As a point and click game it’s way to linear, almost railroading you down one single path with almost no diverging pathways for puzzles unlike other much more simpler point and click games, even better though during the last hour the game changes ganreas from point and click to dungeon crawler. And it has some of the absolute worst combat I've ever played, I’d respect the idea and change if it didn’t feel so half baked and poorly thought out. You also get a wide variety of dialogue options for NPCs even for ones that have no real use in the overall game, but besides a handful of character a lot of them just feel like flavor text and don’t add anything besides giving the town the game takes place feeling a lot more empty; it probably also doesn't help that a lot of the areas in the game only really matter to one puzzle and that’s it or other times some areas will have almost no point at all and are just there for a joke or “irreverence social commentary”, like the towns nuclear missile station run by a PTSD riddled commie heating Vietnam veteran who had entire torso blown and now stand guard and will blow you head off if you enter a conversation with him and mention anything that isn’t wholesome a-ok american pride, and if he does shot you he accidentally falls over and launches the nukes killing every in the town giving you a game over and sending you back to your last save. It’s funny ... .for like the first time but after awhile it just gets tiresome and that can be said for a lot of the games “irreverence social commentary”.

The main games overall message and themes are…I think “violent media does not create violent individuals but rather the people around them create monsters through the act of allowing disgusting degenerate behavior influence their actions”. The game is very much a response to the violent games panic of the 90s and while I do think they did a decent job tying the game’s message and themes into the world of the game and the game itself it still left me with a bad taste in my mouth. It might be because of the really lame twist at the end but I think a large part of it mostly comes from how much of a strawman argument this game feels like at times. Pretty much every other character in the game are inherent violence sociopath with a lot of them either having vices of porn, murder, arson, being racist, incest, child kidnapping, child murder, grooming, being gay?, and since the game takes a page from Blue Velvet where it portrays quiet suburban middle america but under that thin vale it’s a seedy underbelly of degeneracy. But here it’s trying to do its message with the most tone deaf straw man character I’ve seen since Postal and overall it just kinda leaves me feeling like a big fat load of nothing. Don’t get me wrong I’m not trying to disagree with the game’s overall intent I just don’t like how they went about executing the set ideas in the most late 90’s way possible, lude, dumb and somehow racist.

I think my overall take away from Harvester is it’s a game I really wanted to like and still do like from a purely visual perspective, but on almost every other side I either just don’t vibe with parts of the game or actively dislike other parts that are very important parts of the game. I know this game had a really rushed development and as a result the late game feels very unfinished but I don’t know I feel like even if I lived in a timeline where it was fully released like the studio wanted I still don’t think I’d really vibe with it. Maybe I’m just getting older and find the absurdist and counter cultural way of telling a story and delivering a message frustrating and annoying………………………..naa I still like Freddy Got Fingered, it’s probably the games fault.